Commala
by Vega62a
Summary: Backdrop of a Stephen King story; the girls have graduated and moved on with their lives; but when Sachiko finds herself in New York on business, she finds that the world is not quite what she thought. AU spinoff of Fake.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Notes

What in the crikeyfuck am I doing?

This is a really bad idea. Not like _ha-ha, this is such a bad idea we'll all have a good laugh tomorrow after the hangover's gone;_ but like, _fuck me, this is such a bad idea, and we'll be lucky to avoid prison._ It is an AU, set in the world of a Stephen King story, which makes it either a bad idea or a _really _bad idea. In addition, my writing is rusty, and that's putting it so gently that I may as well go ahead and give myself a happy ending while I'm at it. Feel free to read three pages, scowl, click the review button, type "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT" and then never think about me again.

Finally, like Stephen King does at the end of the Dark Tower series, I'm going to say this: If you enjoyed Fake having a happy ending, stop reading. Click that little red button at the top of your screen. Do something else. Go outside. Play a video game. Raise your kids.

A hikikomori (引き籠り) is a person who does not leave their house. It is a prevalent social issue in Japan which is usually tied to psychological issues with the hikikomori him(/her)self. It literally means something like "pulled into being cooped up."(Japanese compound words never translate well.)

Google Maps is responsible for the greater portion of this chapter.

All of the locations I've referenced in Manhattan are real, and I'm sure Aburiya Kinnousuke is a marvelous restaurant. Anybody from that part of New York care to comment? One thing I did notice is that holy shit are there a lot of Japanese restaurants around that area. Being from the Midwest, where a big city might have four or five, of which three or four are overpriced garbage where they serve such authentic meals as "Teriyaki Chicken" and "Shrimp Tempura" I am both baffled and envious. However, they are nothing compared to the street vendors in Osaka, holy shit on a pancake. Which, incidentally, is probably the best description of Okonomiyaki you're likely to find.

This isn't wholly a crossover - you won't meet anybody particularly outside of the Marimite universe here. It's not wholly an AU, either, as the lovely Sumiregawa pointed out to me, since it doesn't take place either inside or outside of the marimite universe, so I'm not really sure what to call it, aside from "vague."

As always, all thanks to my editor, Sumiregawa Nenene, without whom this would be not only a horrible idea, but an unintelligible, horrible idea.

Sound trucks are those things you sometimes see in Japan blaring a political party line. They're creepy as shit.

* * *

Before

* * *

_Stave: _

_Commala come come / There's a woman on the run / Doesn't know where she's going / but she knows she's gotta run_

* * *

_The cashier smiles at me. I think the smile might mean something more than, _thank you for shopping, have a nice day. _I wonder if he would smile at me the same way if I told him that the reason I was buying such a large bottle of Vitamin D was because I often went for a week or more without even seeing the sun. I wonder if he would smile at me the same way if I tried to smile back and realized I'd forgotten how. I wonder if he would smile at me the same way when I did not so much shy from his touch as flee from it. _

_I wish he wouldn't smile at me. _

As it always had been and always would be, starting was the hardest part. Had been the hardest part.

Japan legalized marriage between two members of the same sex in 2012. Yumi Fukuzawa and Sachiko Ogasawara were not ready then, but they weren't far off. Sachiko was twenty four years old, and Yumi twenty three, and neither were quite settled in their careers. There was no doubt between them that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together, but it is the hallmark of the modern couple that they are no longer necessarily willing to gamble on what they want to do simply because of who they want to do it with. Maybe that was called _progress_, or maybe everyone was just getting more self-absorbed. Sachiko and Yumi didn't think about it that way, in any case.

Sachiko published her first novel while they were living in a small house in Kyoto. It was a modern piece of not-quite-real-world fiction, about a young hikikomori who lived her life as though somebody were taking notes on it. Very proper, very clean, very rigid. But nobody to see it, except the lone eye which she sometimes saw peering through the window, or staring into the peephole at her door. The woman's name had been Ling, and Ling had nearly ended Sachiko's writing career before it began. Sachiko had had no idea what to do with Ling. Ling haunted Sachiko for several months, demanding a proper ending, demanding that Sachiko tell her computer the truth, and not just some made up bullshit having to do with the healing power of the love Ling had felt for her neighbor, who sometimes peered into her window, not aware that the eye was there with him as he did. Masturbating as she undressed; who was the reason she undressed slower on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

Sachiko had nearly been driven mad by Ling. Up to that point, she had written the novel in marathon sessions for almost three months, right up to her second-to-last planned chapter, which she was not able to write so much as a word of. Writers block had been too kind a term for her sudden inability to so much as sit down at her keyboard. She had been enraged at herself for not knowing what to do with a story which until that point had been as easy to write as breathing, to the point where it was beginning to take a toll on her relationship with Yumi, and she had been coming close to simply scrapping the novel altogether, when all at once, as though somebody had told her in some passing small talk, she had realized that Ling had seemingly vanished, leaving her door, even her windows, locked, the chain on the door securely fastened. Her absence had been discovered by her landlord, who had had to cut the chain. Who had wondered at the state of the apartment. Had wondered at the indent the woman's body had left on the futon, the indent which still persisted a week or more after she'd gone. (To the police, he said that he knew only that she had paid the rent and then never paid anything again.)

The novel had basically flown off of the shelves. It had made the bestseller's list almost immediately. In Japan, a society which was sometimes deep, and sometimes brutally, numbingly superficial, sometimes the author was as important as the novel, and for that reason Sachiko had never been completely satisfied with the popularity that novel had afforded her – she had made the mistake of not writing under a pseudonym, and as a result, many were fascinated not necessarily by the book, but by the fact that a pretty young lady with such a proper upbringing – (twelve years at the conservative, Catholic, Lillian school for girls! And then this! How deliciously disturbing) – had produced such a frank and grotesque novel. Of course, the novel had been popular in America as well – not as popular as, say, a Murakami Haruki novel might be, but it did well enough for itself.

That novel alone had afforded her the financial security to take half a lifetime off of work if she held her yen close to the vest, but she wasn't satisfied. She published two more novels, only a year apart from one another, and under a pseudonym this time. For this, she sometimes heard herself compared, not unfavorably, with a certain American author from New England, who had become famous writing just the sort of novels that she herself had found she was quite good at – and the latter of the two became just as popular as Ling's story had been. After this she had found the financial security to last her just as long as she desired it to last, and she found that she desired it to last not long at all. Certainly it was the hallmark of a woman brought up in an environment where money was less a means to buy bread and more a means to acquire power over others, but whatever the reason, Sachiko hated having money.

She asked Yumi two things in one single night, the night of their eighth anniversary, Sachiko twenty-six, Yumi twenty-five. The first thing she asked Yumi to do was to help her pick out a house in Tokyo, and not to be cheap about it. To make sure that they moved to Tokyo with as little in savings as she could muster. The second thing she asked Yumi to do was to wear a ring on her fourth finger when they went to their first showing, and to marry her on the day of their ninth anniversary, in Tokyo, with their close friends beside them.

Yumi had said yes both times, her cheeks wet the second. It had been the best day of their lives, and the inspiration for the novel she had written in the cracks of downtime which were scattered about the next six months, primarily concerned with Yumi's job hunt and their combined house hunt. It turned out to be her first novel in which nobody was simply…watched.

It was as when she put the ring on, the voices in her head had been simply…silenced. Since she had been to college, were not so many of them as there had once been, and they had never been clamorous, never maddening, only obnoxious. They sometimes made it hard to sleep. After she put the ring on, she slept like a rock, she was grateful for it. Maybe, she thought, it was a sign from God that she done good. Or maybe her mother, who had so often been the one waking her up at three in the morning, was just allergic to gold.

She felt that when she wore the ring, she could write a novel about somebody who was not watched. Constantly. Maybe because she felt that eye lift off of her as well.

The Ogasawara-Fukuzawa estate turned out to be a very nice two-story house with a tiny yard in the middle of a very nice neighborhood which was, in fact, not so far off from the Lillian School for Girls. In the years that followed, Sachiko would sometimes look outside and see a girl in a crisp skirt, which of course fell beneath her knees, the hem of which was always tidy, walking quickly but with a look of forced calmness down the street, no doubt late for school, no doubt torn between the twin, conflicting calls of the Lady—to never be late, and to never hurry. Yumi had once told her that there was a way in which one could hurry without appearing to hurry, and Sachiko told her with a smile and a poke on the nose that if there was, Yumi had never quite gotten it down.

(Sachiko supposed that people simply assumed that Ladies had nothing better to do than leave early enough that they could walk slowly to wherever they were going.)

It seemed that Sachiko could not escape that demon known as _success, _though. Maybe it was in her blood. She published three more novels, all about quieter, gentler topics than eyes which always seemed to watch, never to act. None were rousingly successful. It seemed that people liked reading about normal lives where normal things happened significantly less than about things which tickled the little parts of them that they could not tell their children about.

_Like at the parties…_

_ Like at the whole fucking estate. _

And then her first novel, Ling's novel _(not mine), _caught on in America. Not the in niche market it had previously held, but more like the niche markets Murakami Haruki still held. It caught _big. _Maybe it was the new translation. Maybe it was the picture of the author on the back flap, the picture of Sachiko, ravishing in a blue button-up, the top button undone, hinting that maybe she knew how to do more than just write (this had been her publisher's idea, and in the end it had been a choice between murdering him in his sleep and taking the fucking picture). Maybe it was the paperback. It was slow at first – her publisher reported that she was selling better than they'd expected in the American market, but that it was nothing to get worked up over, that she should take the extra money and have a nice dinner or something; the same call came three months in a row—have a nice dinner, buy yourself a nice cocktail dress, start up a college fund for your kids—and then on the fourth month, her publisher informed her that her novel had made the New York Times bestseller list. She had a funny feeling that her publisher had been telling her a little white lie or two about how much she had actually been making off of that novel, and ignored it. Not because she thought it was false, but because she didn't care. He could keep the money.

The fifth month, she was informed that Maturin Films was interested in picking up a big-screen adaptation, and that she should probably get her cute little ass to New York in a damn big hurry if she wanted to see it happen. This, of course, meant that she had better get her cute little ass to New York in a damn big hurry if she wanted to publish another novel.

Really, it was Ling who drew Sachiko there. Sachiko had been ready to bite back, to tell her publisher to go find another best-selling author. Yumi couldn't go – or maybe wouldn't go. In fact, she begged Sachiko to stay, and the night before she left, she did so with tears in her eyes. She could not explain why she was so convinced that Sachiko needed to stay, nor could Sachiko explain why she was so convinced that she needed to go.

After all, how could she tell anybody, especially Yumi, that she felt like Ling needed her there?

* * *

One

* * *

_Response:_

_Commala come one / sometimes we gotta run / but if it's ka we're running from / we might as well be done_

_

* * *

_

_When I was fifteen, I was hit by a car. After that, I was afraid. At first, I was only afraid of cars. I walked to school every day anyway, so it was easy enough to live with. I walked on the inside of the sidewalk no matter which direction I was going. Manageable. _

_It wasn't until I hit 17 that I realized that the reason I had been hit by a car was that somebody had pushed me. I began to shy away from people then, but I was still in school, and my parents would not let me drop out. A few friends I trusted, but one day one of them laid a hand on my shoulder, I don't even remember why, and I started to scream. After that they didn't touch me again, and it was not until much later that I realized that without touch, trust cannot exist. _

_The jury's still out on this city, _Sachiko thought, and not for the first time. Someone knocked into her, and she apologized reflexively into the crowd, in Japanese, which effectively doubled her chances of being ignored. She had just come out of the Japanese Society of America, near 1st Avenue and 47th Street in Manhattan, where she had stopped to ask somebody who wouldn't mistake a small bow for a sneeze for directions. As it turned out, she needn't have done so – Maturin Films held its offices in 2 Hammarskjold Plaza, on the corner of 46th St. and 2nd Avenue, in Manhattan, and she was just down the street. Google maps had been unable to come up with a location for 2 Hammarskjold Plaza, and her editor had assured her that she couldn't miss it, but apparently she had. Her English was mediocre at best, and she had been unable to link up with Satou Sei yet, though she worked just around the corner, as a waitress - or bartender, her story changed depending on when you asked her - at Aburiya Kinnousuke, which from what she had told Sachiko was essentially a restaurant where they charged you something nearly equivalent to 2000 yen for a meal you could buy from a street vendor in Osaka for 600 yen.

She was just scoping the place out for now anyway. In spite of her callous attitude towards the prospect of a feature film by a major American production house

_(when did you learn to be callous? I can think of a couple of nuns who would roll over in their graves over that, or maybe roll into their graves, I wonder if they're still around)_

once she had actually arrived in Manhattan, once she had set her bags down, called Yumi (who had been asleep) to tell her she was safe, and laid down on the bed that somebody else had made for her – which felt too much to her like a throwback to living with servants for her comfort - she found that she was quite anxious over the prospect of actually making a movie. Maybe she hadn't wanted to do this, but now that she'd gotten here, she wanted it done right. Moreover, she wanted it done expediently and without her involvement, and while in reality, there wasn't a production house in the world which would not have been overjoyed to hear just that sentiment out of an author whose books they wanted to adapt for theaters, she did not know that. She had mentally prepared herself for many months of writing and rewriting screenplays, for which she had about as much talent as she had for sharpshooting; for dealing with incensed Australian actors whose accents she could barely comprehend storming off to their _turailaass_, and for getting her ass pinched by directors like her father's horrid houseguests had done at the horrid parties which she'd been forced to attend in the same capacity as a nude statue at an art gallery.

She reached a corner and stopped walking, and

_(singing)_

_(someone is singing) _

and somebody bumped into her back, which caused her to both jump and clamp her hand over her mouth—surely the city of New York would not tolerate a Lady such as her disturbing the peace with a shriek—as somebody said something in English which she did not wholly understand, but which she assumed based on the tone was not wholly polite. She had been intending to look at the street signs again, and she forgot about this for a solid two minutes as she stood there, her heart pounding. _At what? At getting bumped in to? I live in Tokyo, for God's sake, Tokyo makes Manhattan look like a quaint little hamlet. I'd have been trampled to death a minute ago in Tokyo, and left there as an example for those who would dare break stride on the sidewalks._

_ (When did I get so morbid)_

No, that wasn't it, not entirely. It wasn't the shock of being touched, although she was still not a fan of being touched by strangers.

Somebody had been singing. Not someone on the street corner, or on a loudspeaker, either.

She looked at the street sign. It said _2somethingsomething_ ay vee ee. She frowned. What in the world was an ay

_Avenue, you silly little girl. Ave is short for avenue. Were you raised in the rice paddies?_

She frowned, closed-lipped. She did not like being lost, and she did not like feeling stupid. She especially did not like being condescended to, especially when it was her herself doing the condescending. _Would that be called reflexive condescension? _Mostly, she just wanted Sei to get off of work already.

_That other sign says 2. This is 2__nd__ street and 46__th__ avenue._

There was a sound truck in the distance, playing a rendition of Bach's 6th Brandenburg piece. She couldn't hear the piece in its entirety – the noise of the city was sufficient to drown out the lower frequencies but she picked out the higher notes from the song, and was able to fill in the rest of that old, familiar song with her imagination. Sei had once called it an unbelievable cliché for someone of her breedingto have such a profound love for classical European music, and Sachiko had been unable to argue with this. Yumi thought it endearing, in the way that a four-pound dog would bark at passerby to defend its master was endearing, but Yumi was also a diehard fan of whatever happened to appear on the week's top 20, so her opinion was not to be trusted.

Sachiko couldn't say that she disapproved of the way they used sound trucks here in America. In Japan they were universally used to spread propaganda from the left or the right, or to sell you various trinkets that you were guaranteed to throw out or lose within the week. A sound truck devoted to classical music – this was why America was still a cultural -

_That's your phone._

Sachiko fished through her purse, trying very hard not to go red. _Why? You weren't even talking to anybody._

She got it out of her purse and flipped it open with her thumb, hoping it hadn't gone to voicemail already. She slipped a glance at the screen as she put it to her ear – _se _was the first syllable, which was encouraging.

"Hello?" She hoped she didn't sound as desperate as she felt. She stopped walking for half a second, felt the fear of death come over her, then started again.

"Sachiko!" Sei yelled over New York, which was mostly a testament to New York. "Sorry I didn't call you before, I had a table."

"That's –" Sachiko froze as somebody jostled past her, clamping her hand down on her purse. Was this a reflex? Could a reflex develop out of fear and not of practice? Probably. "Fine." She started walking again. Why was this city making her so tense? _Especially with that lovely singing coming from just a little way off._

"Can we meet up by—" Sachiko looked up, read the street sign carefully. "2nd and 47th?"

"Next to Hammarskjold?" While Sei had lived in America for the past 3 years, and her English had improved far beyond what Sachiko could ever hope for herself, words that were clearly not of English origin still did not so much roll off of her tongue as flop off of them. Sachiko had no idea what she had said. It came out _hah-mah-su-ka-ru-do. _

"I'm sorry," she said reflexively. (This was certainly a reflex born of practice). "Next to what?"

"Er," Sei said, "Next to 2nd and 46th. There's a tower there, a big black glass one. '2' is the first part of the name you'll see on the front of it. Let's meet there."

Sachiko looked back towards 46th, and saw that indeed, there was a great black skyscraper on the other side of the street. This, however, left her with the monumental task of not only backtracking a block, but crossing 2nd Avenue, which at this time of day looked just enough like a parking lot to be dangerous. Something clicked in her head. _2 Hammarskjold Plaza! That's where I'm supposed to be! _For a Japanese person, who read English in syllables, _Hammarskjold_ was probably the cruelest name they could have picked for a meeting place. It had been like asking Sachiko to memorize a nonsense string of letters, and Sachiko had clearly overestimated her talents, not for the first time since she'd been published.

_(__I__t's okay everyone else _underestimates _you.)_

"I think that I'm nearly there already," Sachiko said. "I can see it."

"Great!" Sei shouted into the receiver, and Sachiko winced. "I'll be there in a few minutes!"

She reached the corner, stood with a massive crowd of people waiting to cross. The light turned and the entire intersection was still full of cars, so the rest of the pedestrians began to weave between them, either not noticing or not caring that as the cars which had safely made it past the crosswalk began to inch forward, they were actually holding up traffic. Sachiko waited for the end of the light, not quite willing to go as far as holding traffic, or maybe just not willing to risk the ire of New York City drivers, who had never been compared favorably to…well, to anybody. She closed her eyes, took in a breath, waited. Surely this was a rare incidence. _(Every_ _driver simultaneously deciding to cause gridlock. Definitely random.) _

As her eyes closed, the city seemed to flood into her. Without the disadvantage of sight, it felt remarkably similar to Tokyo.

One could smell nothing but car exhaust if one walked with her eyes open, but with them closed, one could smell a dozen smells, some wonderful, some toxic. She smelled middle-eastern food coming from somewhere nearby. Indian not far off. Hot dog carts, smelling of meat that wasn't quite appetizing but was not wholly repulsive either; pizza from somebody nearby (she could hear loud chewing if she concentrated, or maybe this was just her imagination). The chalky smell of a dry cleaners.

One could hear nothing but car engines if one walked with her eyes open, but with them closed, one could hear a hundred individual radios on top of them, playing rap; playing reggae; playing music which came from a part of the world where there was sand and wars and, if the news was to be believed, little else; even one playing a song Sachiko recognized from the radio in Japan. And from far off, and yet nearby, almost as though it was in her head, a choir. The last movement of Beethoven's 9th, what they called _Ode to Joy _if they were diehard fans of whatever happened to be on the week's top 20. Someone was singing it, and it was lovely, beautiful even. As she noticed it, she began to tune everything else out, and as the seconds went by it was like a marching symphony, getting closer to her ears, singing and playing in the most beautiful arrangement she'd ever heard in her life, raising gooseflesh on her arms the way usually only Yumi was able to.

People were walking around her, someone bumped into her, and she lost the sound, and for a moment, she almost screamed in frustration, and had no idea why. She opened her eyes, saw the crowd moving around her. Decided to chance crossing the street.

_Besides, that's where the song is._

She hurried across the intersection

_(when did I learn to hurry? Maybe it was a skill I picked up when my ratio of jeans worn to skirts worn exceeded one) _

and moved against the wall so as not to obstruct the flow of traffic. Pressed the back of her head against the glass of 2 Hammarskjold Plaza.

_(heard the song)_

And felt the tension drain from her shoulders. Being lost in an unfamiliar city was stressful. Being exactly where she wanted to be in a bustling urban conglomerate was utterly natural.

Sachiko wasn't sure how long she stayed like that. She had a watch but something told her that looking at it would drag her, perhaps painfully, away from the song. New York passed around her and for a while, it was as though she were barely a part of it.

Eventually, Satou Sei caught up to her, and although hearing Sei's voice, even distorted by the white noise of the crowd, once again caused the song to escape her, to vanish into the crowd, her heart lifted as she opened her eyes and caught her first glimpse of her old friend in over three years.

Time had been kind to Satou Sei, as Sachiko had somehow known it would. She had been beautiful in her teenage years, and although she had abandoned her jeans and plain white shirt for slacks and a nice blouse, she had not lost the impish look in her eyes; the one that, if you looked closely enough, informed you that maybe, just maybe, she was a couple of paces ahead of you, laughing at you while your back was turned.

Also, her blouse was buttoned all the way up. Sachiko imagined that that Sei would have no trouble making the month's rent on tips in a single day if she took it down couple of buttons, and wondered if she had a special _make-my-rent-off-of-idiot-salarymen day _where she did just that.

_Oh right, they don't have salarymen in America. Well, at least not ones who call themselves salarymen. _

Sachiko pursed her lips, aware that her grin was a little bigger and a little dumber than she had probably intended, and consciously decided to not lift her arm and wave. She settled for fixing her eyes on Sei's as the girl approached, smiling as much as she could without appearing to have a mental deficiency.

The level to which the two had missed one another was not entirely clear to either of them until the moment when Sei came within arms' reach of Sachiko. Sei, instead of smiling and saying, _Hey Sachiko, it's been a while, _(though that was what she'd planned – in America, one seemed cooler the less one seemed to give a shit, and Sei had found that looking cool was an excellent way to avoid the hassle of finding women to talk to at the bars, as they tended to approach her) simply extended her arms, waited less than half a second (as far as she was concerned, _consent _was Sachiko not screaming in alarm and fleeing) and flung them around her, pulling her into a tight hug that she was just a little surprised to find Sachiko return. (Though Sachiko might have denied it later, claiming to be taken off-guard.)

After probably thirty seconds (it took her twenty to blink a few rogue tears from her eyes, and then she gave herself ten seconds to enjoy herself) like that, Sachiko finally broke it, pulling Sei to arm's length again and then letting go.

"Sei," Sachiko said, "It's been a long time."

Sei only nodded, pursing her lips against tears that had no place anywhere near her eyes. She shook her head, smiled, and said, "You look good, Sachiko. Really."

Sachiko bit her lip for a moment – _to hell with it, if I can't be myself with Sei, who can I be myself with – _and then said, "If you only sounded a little less surprised, I'd be tempted to blush."

Sei laughed, surprised and delighted. "Is that what you're into now? What happened to flattening your skirt and bowing politely?"

"It took New York City all of ten minutes to suck the polite out of me," Sachiko said, though this was not true – nothing could truly suck the polite out of Sachiko Ogasawara, though more and more she found herself having to dig around for it when she needed it.

"Hell," Sei said, "that's doing pretty well. Did you do the thing where—"

_ you apologize to whoever nearly bowled you over_ (Sachiko broke out in a grin)

"you apologize to whoever nearly bowled you over yet?"

Sachiko, still grinning, nodded. "In Japanese, at that."

"So you were ignored twice as much."

Sachiko nodded, allowed a moment of contented silence to pass between them, and then said, "How have you been, Sei?"

"Can't complain," Sei said with a shrug. Dismissive. Sachiko did not let herself frown at this, but she didn't like it. She couldn't quite put her finger on why, but she didn't like it. She wished all of a sudden that Yumi were here, feeling that Sei would have said something else, something _more, _just then.

_Or could it maybe, possibly, be that you're overthinking this?_

_ (A professional author, overthinking? Never in life.)_

Was Sei distracted all of a sudden?

Sachiko looked at her closely as they dipped into another moment's silence, and realized she was.

_(she's listening to the singing. She always takes a minute to stop and listen to the singing when she's down here) _

For some reason, Sachiko could not bring herself to distract Sei from the singing, even if it was the singing which was distracting Sei from her. It seemed…wrong. Like refusing to allow somebody a cold beer after work on a hot day, instead making them wait until it was lukewarm. So she waited. Politely.

And after a minute, she started to hear the song herself, and smiled.

It wasn't long. A few minutes, at most, and then Sei said, as though she'd never paused, "Are you hungry? There's a food court in here, otherwise," she swept her arm around. "Anything you want. But more Japanese-themed food than probably anywhere else I've ever been, Tokyo included." She grinned.

"To be honest," Sachiko said, and _now, _of all times, felt a little color rise to her cheeks, "I could use a hamburger."

"Would you like your hamburger made from beef or the stuff they scrape off of the sidewalks?"

Sachiko cocked her head. Sei considered this tacit consent.

"McDonalds it is," she said, and then took Sachiko Ogasawara's arm and led her into 2 Hammarskjold Plaza. As she did, the singing intensified.

And for some reason, although she had eaten McDonalds in Japan and hated it, had thought the hamburgers little more than thick brown slop, she ordered a quarter pounder with cheese, and enjoyed every bite of it. She half-listened to Sei the whole time, and half-listened to the singing, and she had the feeling that Sei was doing the same.

She spent the night at Sei's apartment, preferring the slightly lumpy couch, the muffled bass line from a nearby apartment, and the two stringy blankets to the cushy mattress, polished silence, and lush quilt of the hotel which she had rented and then summarily ignored by an inch and a mile. The two split a bottle of wine, and laughed the entire night. Sei called Yumi to inform her that she would be corrupting her wife that evening. Yumi flustered, but was laughing by the end, probably in spite of herself. Eventually, Sachiko went to sleep, and she slept like a log.

She dreamed.

* * *

_He is young and he is handsome and he is killing them one by one. They are already shot, but they were shot quickly, and some may yet live. He's fixing that, putting his huge revolver to their heads, one by one, and pulling the trigger. Every six shots, he reloads without so much as a pause. His hands work automatically, mechanically, without waste or hesitation. Is this a scene of genocide?_

_ One of them has a plan. A plan to end the killing. There is a hidden gun. _


	2. Chapter 2

Author's notes

I'm trying to write a lot of chapters at once, before I post any of them, because I am quite possibly the least consistent writer on the planet. I only get about six hours to myself every day, and I sincerely enjoy playing video games and drinking with those six hours. I enjoy writing as well, but writing takes thought, and thinking is in short supply nowadays.

Many of the details of Yoshino's character I have summarily made up; I don't think any of these conflict with what we know of her from the series. If you take umbrage, please let me know. That doesn't mean I'll do anything about it, but it's good to be told.

Credit where credit is due, part of this chapter belongs to the marvelous film _Oldboy_.

In case you were curious, IT was not a reference to the Stephen King novel. Think about the poor saps at work who fix your internet, and next time you see them, tell them thankya. Many of them have 4-year degrees in CS, making them far overqualified and far underpaid. Bum economies are something, huh.

I don't think Yoshino would like a very masculine type, but would anybody really be surprised to hear that she occasionally swings the other way? (But the other way from what? Ha-ha).

I lay on the computer a little in this chapter; don't mind it. I promise it's not a marty stu SI, (you'll know by the way you'll never see him again, and how he has that new plot-device smell), but we have to write what we know. Those of you in the know: Come up with your favorite four-line perl regex and post in your review it for bonus points. Maybe I'll be able to tell what it does.

A lot of you probably won't like the way you see the girls behaving in this chapter. It earns its M rating, I think, or at least comes close to it, and I get the feeling that I will be getting a lot of cries of OOC for it. If you've read _It's So Cowardly, _you'll know just how okay I am with that. I prefer to experiment with characters.

* * *

Two

Stave:

_Commala come through / I'll sit a spell with you / if there's nothing else to do but talk/ then that's just what we'll do_

_Maybe this is clichéd, but I think what led to my evacuation of the world of the living more than anything else was the Internet. _

_The truth is, nobody can live without any human contact if they place any value on their sanity. I tried for a solid three months; that was the first time I attempted suicide. A man in a white coat was the first person I talked to in three months. We talked about, among other things, my sex life (what sex life, ha-ha), and I don't think he understood the extent to which that made me never want to see anyone ever again._

_When I got back to my apartment, I threw out the business card of the counselor I'd been referred to, and purchased a video game, what they call an MMO. The MMO became my best friend, my window into the world, and on rare occasion, my lover. What else but the Internet can simultaneously hold all of those titles?_

He gave Yoshino Shimazu's ass a pinch, and although she knew that _making a_ _fuss _on the train was considered _in poor taste_, (which, if you were of Lillian stock, equated to _in violation of the Geneva conventions_)she looked around, saw three men looking slightly red. All three seemed to her to be avoiding her gaze. Seemed to be hoping she wouldn't notice them—which, of course, doubled their chances of being noticed. Only one of them had actually had the nuts to touch her, but she had a feeling – a sort of intuition which felt stronger than intuition – that all three had been contemplating it. She wondered idly whether any of them would have tried if they'd seen all the odds and ends in her purse.

_(you have more than just odds and ends in there)_

_ (why on earth do you keep this up)_

_ Please be quiet, I have to work today._

The train pulled to a stop, the speaker informing her that this was her stop in a polite, detached tone. Time for work. Time to be a good citizen. Work, receive your reward, feed your belly. Go to a bar. Have a few. Go home with someone you don't know, don't particularly want to know.

Yoshino was in the middle of a human wave which would have propelled her forward, or possibly trampled her and left her as an example for the others, had she dared to stop. And yet, she was not sure if she hesitated as she exited the train. She felt like she did. Like she could not have avoided hesitating. What kind of complacent idiot just went from one discrete location to another without a moment of caution? _(isn't this world full of holes after all) _

And then she was down and moving, leading the pack, in fact. Not that any of them were particularly being led. It was the unique entity known as _the crowd, _which propelled her forward, and she fucking hated it.

Yoshino exited the platform and began a familiar walk. Three blocks south of the station, two blocks west, a final block south. Inefficient, but only if her goal was nothing more than getting to the office where she was probably the toughest manager in the country. It wasn't.

Her goal was the alley. It was always the alley. It had been the alley for the last two years.

The alley where she sometimes heard the horrible chimes. Not every day. More often when she got her monthlies.

The alley that was the last place she had seen Rei.

Three blocks south. As she approached, she could hear the first one in the distance, strong today. Still two blocks away and she could hear the faint clanging in her head, a noise that had forgotten that the polite way to enter the brain was through the ears. Like the onset of a migraine, and her head often hurt when she passed the alley, but her throat often choked, as well, and that had nothing to do with what she called the _nutso-chimes. _(She was quite certain that anybody who was more convinced that an imaginary set of chimes had more to do with the disappearance and presumed death of Rei Hasekura than did a small, shady section of a neighborhood that always seemed just a little more dilapidated than all the others was fucking nutso.)

She put her hand to her temple, massaged it, but did not stop or even slow her gait. She passed by the alley two minutes later, and looked

_I bet you can find her_

down the alleyway, saw nothing. Just the dark end of an alleyway with a manhole right up against the wall,

_I bet if you come down here, you'll find her. She went down the manhole, you know. Went exploring. _

stopped.

She didn't often stop and stare anymore. She hadn't spoken to the alley, hoping, wishing (in one hand, shitting in the other, which fills up first, ha-ha) that Rei could hear her, for six months now.

Not since the alley had started talking back. Started encouraging her to search. Down the alley, down the manhole, down to...to somewhere else.

Down, down, down.

_Come on, it's lots of fun here. There's no recession. Hell, there's no economy. You won't have to worry about whether you'll end up having to lay somebody off or if you can skate by cutting salaries again. You can see Rei again. You can touch her if you want. You can touch her anywhere you want. She won't stop you. She might even help you along a bit. _

Yoshino would have shut her ears, if only the fucking sound weren't coming in through her eyes. She'd close her eyes if she wasn't sure the alley would just whisper it in through her nose. Or her mouth as she breathed. Or her fucking

_(come on honey let's see your cunny)_

pores. She was pretty sure she couldn't close those on command. Yet.

_Come on I'll show you a picture of her if you'll just take a peek down here. Genuine Polaroid pho-to-graph. While you're here we can take a couple of Polaroids of you if you'll just give us a little peek. Show the world what Lillian taught you to be ashamed of._

She had promised herself she would never answer it again, but today, she did. Only a little. Under her breath. Tokyo buzzed, constantly, at a high enough volume that one always had to speak with at least a little _oomph _in her voice, so she was reasonably unafraid of being heard, but she'd have been unafraid of being heard in a cave with three nuns standing next to her. "I'd carve it out and eat it," she murmured, her voice steady, "before I'd show it to you."

Was giving it a pronoun legitimizing it?

It was already fucking legitimate. She visited it daily, she could give it a pronoun.

The thing laughed. _Laughed. _Not a small chuckle, either—the guffaw filled her head, filling it to bursting, to the point where she actually had to stop (someone almost bumped into her, apologized, and moved on without really noticing) and cradle the bridge of her nose in her fingers. _The girl has some steel in her after all. All right, cully, cut it out. Sautee it up. Season it. Set a nice glass of wine out to wash it down. Eat it._

_Eat it._

EAT IT.

Yoshino started to walk again, and resolved to close her mind to it as it taunted her, its voice fading in her head, but not nearly fast enough, _EAT IT, EAT IT, EAT IT CULLY EAT IT. _

She was five minutes late, and this alone was cause for some discussion. _The boss _was never late. _The boss _was not only on time, but counted precisely how many seconds of work you missed, and held each one of them against you.

Not only was_ the boss _late, but she was haggard. Her hair was neat, her skirt crisp, her makeup perfect, and her expression an utter mess. They didn't know what it was, only that they desperately hoped none of the others were stupid enough to ask about it. She passed through the sea of desks without so much as a word, and not so much as a word was spoken to her. Her eyes never seemed to leave the path she'd plotted out. This was not unusual; what was unusual was that this time, they could not feel_ the boss's _scrutiny, vision or no. She was distracted. Somehow, this felt even more dangerous.

They rode it out, and she passed, as a fever might – leaving no lasting damage, only vague memories.

As it turned out, one of them was very stupid indeed.

Yoshino shut the door to her office harder than she'd intended, didn't notice, and shut the curtains to the two windows that looked out from the office to the floor without thinking about it (anybody with a brain knew that when the curtains were shut, to knock on her door was to take one's life into one's own hands).

The voice had faded from her mind but now somehow rang in her ears like an echo _(eat it eat it eat it cully) _in a deep canyon. This was not the first time the alley had spoken back to her, and she should not have felt so rattled by it.

Was it because she had tried to confront it?

Or because when she did, it simply laughed at her?

_Did you really think it would be afraid of you? Did you really think that a talking alley would respect you simply for having the stones to tell it you weren't completely terrified of it? _

_I must be losing my fucking mind._

She took her jacket off and hung it on the coat hanger near her desk, pondered sitting down. She already knew precisely how much she'd be getting done today, and it fell somewhere between nothing and squat. She looked to one side of the office, where she kept a treadmill, thought about having a run. She had had it purchased with company funds when she got promoted, one of the conditions she'd laid out for accepting the promotion. Officially, it was for her health – she'd had quite a few doctors over the years, and they had been unanimous in informing her that although her surgery had been a success, if she didn't exercise regularly and keep a strict diet, she still ran a very good chance of dying before the age of fifty.

As of late, the treadmill was for something else entirely. Something she didn't quite understand yet. She had demanded it with the intent of keeping her heart beating, and so had mostly gone on little jogs, twenty minutes intended to get her sweating but not wheezing.

That had changed as she began to understand some of what had surrounded the alley. The more she investigated, the more she had felt the need to not simply stay in shape, but to become strong. She had started training not only to jog long distances, but to sprint, and to walk for long distances. Sometimes she would jury-rig her laptop to the treadmill and walk the full 9 hours she was at work, the treadmill informing her she'd walked almost 40 miles. She was in the best shape of her life by a mile _(and Rei's not here to see it)._

She felt like today would be a sprinting day. She glanced over to the lock on the door, saw it was locked, couldn't remember locking it. She went to the small closet near the corner of her threadbare office, opened it. There wasn't much in the closet, just like there wasn't much in her office, just like there wasn't much in her apartment.

_(just like there isn't much in your life)_

There was, however, a sports bra, (she hardly needed it – she and Yumi had always had a healthy competition going, and that was the best she would ever do, short of having a kid or plumping up) a set of conservative running shorts, (which went down to her knees), a (slightly less conservative) tank top, socks, running shoes, and a spare set of panties. (Because nothing in this world, slow drowning death included, was quite so horrid as going to a staff meeting in sweat-soaked panties which proceeded to dry into a crusty mess around your thighs as a shit-dull middle-management type informed you that productivity was up 17% but profits were down 9% due to a bum economy, which meant that you were going to have to equal that gap out with your worker's livelihoods.)

She unbuttoned and shed her blouse and bra quickly, sliding into the sports bra as quickly as possible. (Another old habit _– _a Lady is nude as little as is possible, and never around others, which she always thought would make sex a horridly awkward, rushed affair, just as the locker rooms at Lillian were horridly awkward, rushed affairs.) After sliding the tank top over her shoulders, she dropped her skirt and panties and brought those up as quickly as possible as well. She gave the socks in the closet a sniff, decided they were still okay, (and so what if they weren't? Nobody would be smelling them while she was running) and put them on. She was stuffing her ankles into her still-tied running shoes when there was a knock at her door.

She froze for a second, frowned. There were no new people in her department, so there was nobody who _didn't _know just what happened to the poor saps who had a question or proposition for her when her shades were closed, and there was nobody who _didn't _know where the bodies were subsequently stashed. (At their desks, as an example to the others.) It could have been somebody from another department, and she was quite certain that if it was human resources, the little bastards outside would have gladly let them go to their deaths without a word of warning, possibly snickering as they did.

(A brief flicker of paranoia – what if it was her boss; she gave exactly two shits what he thought of her, but didn't like the idea of his eyes flicking over her slim frame, outlined so well by her workout clothes.)

Another knock. No way was it somebody from her section. Knocking once was provoking the sleeping predator; knocking twice was poking it in the eye with a stick.

She grimaced, her temper fouling, and unlocked and opened the door, probably a little too sharply. What greeted her immediately was a white button-up shirt and plain blue tie forming a sharp contrast with the smooth, slightly lined cool orange of a gently-muscled neck. She instinctively experienced two entirely separate, entirely uncontrollable reactions: The first, annoyance – white button-ups and boring blue ties meant IT, and that meant some new, useless feature installed on her computer and mindlessly dull conversation about just how awesome this new, useless feature was; the second, a bit of pleasure. Yoshino was not much of a judge, but it was a _very _nice neck.

The _very _nice neck belonged to an equally nice face; the face was masculine, but appeared to be hanging onto it by only a thread, with smooth skin, high cheekbones, lovely black hair that framed his eyes nicely, and a nose and lips that were both just slightly upturned. His frame was almost as thin as hers, just slightly taller. On his face was not the look of fear she had come to expect, and indeed, encouraged actively, but a look of almost boredom—no, a flicker of something else passed across it, just for an instant, and she knew that look, but not from experience, (she had some, but certainly not a wealth) but rather from intuition. It passed as quickly as it had come, but she stored it away for later, and couldn't tell herself in the next moment why she had.

Not unless she were being honest, anyway.

"What is it?" she said, laying on the _I'm going to kill you and eat your corpse_ as thick as she could.

"Got something to configure on your PC," he said. "New tool, very …" he stopped. "Well, not very interesting at all, but it's new, anyway. Pretty interface. Lots of light blue and rounded edges. I'm pretty sure that was at least half the budget, since the whole thing is just a mask for a four-line perl script."

She smiled in spite of herself, and then pushed it away, nodded, moved aside. "I swear, last time one of you was here they told me they could do this remotely."

"We can, but only if your computer's on."

"Tough situation to remedy. Is the phone broken?" She couldn't quite understand why she was being as rude to him as she was, except that this was how she was to people who had bothered her; maybe her difficulty came from the fact that she didn't really feel that bothered, and god help her, she knew why, and she knew she knew, and she didn't want to fucking hear it.

He grinned a little sheepishly. "On the level?"

"On the level."

"Was a dare."

"Oh, come on," she grimaced as he walked over to her computer, hit the power button, and waited. "They are not honestly doing that now."

"You scared Yoshida pretty bad," he remarked simply, and she smiled at this. She didn't have a fucking clue who Yoshida was, only that the guys in IT (and they were mostly male, so she didn't feel bad using the qualifier) made a habit of knocking when her door was shut and her blinds were closed, and that she tended to go rough on them as an example to the others. Clearly it had backfired.

_If that's what you want to call it. _

He made his way over to her laptop, sitting in its station at her desk. He stood by it for a moment, and she grimaced. "You can turn it on," she said, allowing herself just a sliver of annoyance.

"Some people get touchy," he said, turning the computer on.

"Some people in IT, maybe, where the computer is a sacred sign of status," she remarked, and then shut the door behind her. In the next instant, she pretended to herself that she didn't know why she _(honey honey show us your cunny) _had.

"Among other things."

"Substitute?" Her eyebrows went up, and she realized that she really didn't want to know.

"To some of them."

"I'm guessing not to you, though."

"Confidentially? My GPU is huge."

She bit back a chuckle. _(A lady does not laugh at a dirty joke. A lady would sooner be flogged than laugh at a dirty joke.)_ "I have not a clue what that means, and before you try to explain it to me," (he shut his mouth), "_don't._" Being honest, though, she took more of a liking than was probably good for the discipline of the company to his utter disregard for the fact that she was not only his superior, but his _female _superior, when telling dirty jokes.

He turned his eyes back to the computer, staring at the loading screen. She frowned for a moment, until she (_honey honey_) rose up just a touch on her toes and saw that his mouth was working, forcing back what was very obviously a laugh.

"Okay, it's coming up. I'll be five minutes. Don't mind me, just do whatever you'd do if I wasn't here."

"If you weren't here I'd be on my computer," she pointed out.

He frowned for a second (she saw it in his eyes—she'd come down off the balls of her feet). "Fair point," he remarked, clearly not quite sure what to say.

_In fairness, you're not making it easy for him. The poor dork. _

He clicked the mouse, frowned, clicked again, and out of reflex, she said, "It's slow."

"The eternal mystery: Why is my computer slow?" He didn't look up.

"Thought you people would know."

"Nobody knows. Even IT types can only shrug and say, _it's old. _I have a couple buddies who make these things, and they say pretty much the same thing."

"For some reason I always envisioned computer geeks like car geeks – if you can restore an old hunk of junk it's way better than the latest model. Even if it costs you twice what the latest model is worth."

"Not so," he remarked. "If your machine is more than a year or two old it's no longer your machine, just a temporary one while all the parts for your new rig show up in the mail."

"That feels somehow heartless."

"Clearly you are more of a car person."

She smiled at this, as she had never driven a car in her life. She lived in Tokyo; who needed a car? The trains were faster, better for the environment, and they sometimes gave you that warm, sweaty feeling up the back of your dress.

He typed for a few seconds, frowned, then typed again and nodded. "You want me to configure this for you, or do you want to figure it out yourself?"

"Will I ever use it?"

"That depends. What do you do, exactly?"

"I make mean faces at everyone until they work harder."

He snorted. "Probably not, then. But everyone who's a department manager or higher gets it, so the company can call itself _lean _to the stockholders."

She was not certain that she had known anybody as cynical as _(herself)_ this since Sei had left for New York. She missed it, somehow. She and Sei had never been terribly close, but Yumi had meant the world to Sei, and that had meant that the older woman was, by association, important, and to be visited with on occasion.

"That ought to do it," he said. "Anything else I can do for you?"

She paused, pursed her lips, and said what she wanted to say, without thinking about it. (Which was, incidentally, the only way she could have said it.) "You can take me out for a coffee."

He froze, a little stunned, a little wary, a lot frightened. "Like, now?"

"No, after work. Now I need to," _(get on my treadmill and __-__ not jog __-__ fucking sprint as long as I can__,__ as hard as I can__,__ and not just because I'm suddenly feeling chubby and self-conscious in spite of my best efforts__,__ but because I just did something I want to run away from) _"make mean faces at the poor drudgery outside. I usually leave at about six."

"Oh my word, the management has it easy," he said, a grin spreading to replace the slow terror that had taken over his face in the moments after her request. "If I leave before seven I may as well not come back."

"That's fine," she said quickly, "I can…well, I can work. Or wait. Or something. But there's a lovely restaurant across the street, they serve Italian food there, and—"

"What happened to coffee?"

"They have coffee there too, but at seven I'll be hungry." _At six I'll be hungry, at seven I'll probably chew my arm off._

He waited for about four seconds that lasted about four years, and then said, "Sure. And I'll try and sneak out at six thirty; I'm not sure if I'll be able to, but it's worth a shot."

The implied, the unsaid: _You're _worth a shot. A grin played on his face; a little excited, a little nervous, a little afraid, a little hopeful. Not the look she wanted to see. Yoshino hoped he wasn't…

_What? _

_ Clingy? _

_ You're horrible, you know that._

"Okay," she said. She'd be there by six. No force in the world could keep her here late without a fucking good reason. (How she'd ever made manager was still a mystery to her.) She'd order dinner for 6:45; she figured if it took him longer to show than it took her to eat, he wouldn't show at all. Yoshino knew she was pretty, but she also knew that she was, as somebody who spent most of their time in Harajuku might put it, not fashionable. To some men, a trendy shirt and a nice pair of boots was infinitely more attractive than a nice ass and a pair of tits. (Ironically, this, much like the Lillian view on nudity, made her feel that sex between folks with these sorts of priorities must be very awkward indeed.)

"Okay," he echoed. "I'll see you there, then. As soon as I can."

_He's going to be clingy. _

_ God fucking damn it._

_ You are horrible. Well and truly horrible._

After he left, she got on the treadmill and ran. The new tool didn't do anything that she had a use for; she deleted it.

By six o'clock, her treadmill informed her that she'd journeyed about forty miles, and gone fucking nowhere in the process. A normal day.

The cute boy from IT wasn't that clingy, but he was surprised when, early the next morning, both of them sticky with sweat and Yoshino, at least, feeling roughly fifty times better than she had the morning before, handed him his pants. He didn't protest, but he looked disappointed. Not clingy. Maybe. He left looking a bit sad, and when the door closed behind him, she had three thoughts in rapid succession:

_God, that was just what I needed._

_ Thank god he wasn't clingy._

_ Jesus Christ, you're horrible. _

All three were true.

* * *

Response:

Commala come two / that's not all that we'll do / for if by night you would have me / then commala I'd have you

Sachiko woke the next morning with a splitting headache and the distinct impression that something furry had crawled into her mouth and died sometime during the night. The wine they had split the previous night had been what Sei called _two-buck chuck; _it had actually cost around five dollars, after taxes, but Sei had informed her that this wine had earned its title decades before and never quite lost it. The taste was not offensive, though not quite what Sachiko was used to (she was, in fact, used to very little when it came to alcohol – she had kicked her high-school ulcer around the same time she had started to seriously date Yumi, but her stomach was much weaker for it, so she wasn't able to drink particularly often). Something she had never quite been warned about was that cheap booze led to costly hangovers. Sei, it seemed, was more used to it, as by the time Sachiko had finally wrenched her eyes open she was already up, dressed in a white tank-top and panties and little else, and staring out her window.

Sachiko sat up, and her brain took about three seconds to follow her skull. Like a true Ogasawara, she gritted her teeth and bore it, but had to steady herself with a hand. Sei noticed her a moment later, and turned, grinning.

"Hitting you pretty hard, is it?" she asked, not sounding awfully concerned. "I warned you."

"No you didn't," Sachiko said through a mouthful of cotton balls that somebody had apparently stuffed in her mouth to suppress the dead-rodent taste. "I haven't felt this awful since—" Since when? Probably since Kyoto.

"Since Kyoto," Sei finished, and this time Sachiko smiled.

"I was just thinking that."

Sei nodded, and there was a moment's silence, during which Sachiko did her best not to notice the pathetic job Sei's tank top did covering her generous bust. She turned her eyes to the window. "What were you doing?"

"Just…" she paused, and Sachiko knew the answer—_she was listening to the song. Her apartment is only a couple of blocks from the tower—_"looking out at the city." _Why is she lying about it?_

"That's not quite…" Sachiko frowned. She did not feel bad calling Sei on her fib, but she had never quite known how to do something like that directly. She wanted to say something like, _and the song, I can hear it just a little. It's quite lovely, isn't it, _but she couldn't hear it, and she had a strange feeling that Sei would know it. She frowned, saw something in Sei's eyes. Something not quite right.

A thought occurred to her suddenly: _Be careful. _

_Of what, exactly?_

_ Of _her.

"That's not quite what?" Sei asked.

Sachiko felt somehow more uncomfortable about the thought of _being careful _around one of her close friends than about calling her on a direct lie. "Not quite right," she said. "You were listening to the…to the song."

"I was," Sei admitted with no hesitation. "You can just barely hear it from the window. That's why I stay here."

It was from Sei's eyes, rather than her words, that Sachiko thought, _she doesn't like admitting that. Is she embarrassed?_ The thought of Sei embarrassed by anything was a little odd, but didn't feel wholly out of place, as Sei began to, probably unconsciously, shift slightly away from the window. Shutting the song out.

_What is she embarrassed of? The song is lovely. _

Sachiko decided that pressing the topic would be a bad idea, and did her best to change the subject. "What are we doing today?"

"You're going to make a movie, if I recall correctly," Sei replied, and her face immediately cleared, glad to be rid of the topic of the song, as though they were not discussing a lovely tune so much as rough bondage. "What time is your meeting?"

"Eleven," Sachiko said, and somebody inside her head headbutted her, reminding her just how early eleven could be. She closed her eyes and put her index finger and thumb on the bridge of her nose, grimacing against the pain. "Remind me why I let you convince me to drink that entire bottle of wine."

"Hey, sister," Sei said. "You did most of the convincing yourself." She grinned, and her grin came close to touching her eyes, but did not quite manage to do so. "All I did was a teensy little bit of enabling."

"For shame," Sachiko said quietly, pressing the bridge of her nose a bit harder.

"Shall I make you a prairie oyster?" Sei asked, her eyes beginning to do an old dance that Sachiko was more than familiar with. For some reason, Sachiko felt a great deal of comfort at this little shit-eating twinkle. Felt the feelings of suspicion, of caution, of concern that Sei had given her melt away, and into a blinding jolt of nausea.

Sachiko's face twisted, and before she was halfway to her feet, Sei shouted, _down the hall to the left, _although she already knew where the bathroom was. The instructions to follow freed her mind to focus on

_ Holditinholditinholditin_

Keeping her gullet down until she hit the bathroom, but as she opened the door, her mind emptied entirely and she felt the song seep into her spine. As she closed her eyes and stopped running, she felt her stomach begin to quiet, and she put her hand on the doorknob, steadying herself.

_(ashes to ashes, dust to dust, everything returns from whence it came, and McDonalds is no exception ha-ha) _

"Well," Sei said from behind her, and a moment later, she felt two hands, gentle but firm, clasp her arms just so.

_(when did she get there?)_

_(Firm hands. Firm.)_

She stayed there for another minute or so, quietly savoring the feeling of her stomach calming. "You good?" Sei asked eventually.

"I think so," Sachiko said, and couldn't think of a way to follow that up, so she didn't. "I'm sorry about that," She straightened up, looked down at the plain blue T-shirt, (which she had stolen from Sei – she wasn't certain, but she didn't believe she actually owned any T-shirts herself) which was now no longer entirely blue, but rather sporting a large red patch from a spill that Sachiko could not entirely recall, and grimaced. "And about…"

"Don't worry about it," Sei said with a smile that Sachiko could not avoid describing to herself as _chipper_. "I work at a bar. I've gotten way more on way nicer shirts before. It comes out. You probably shouldn't be wearing a T-shirt to your meeting anyway."

"Probably not," Sachiko agreed, and then paused. "What time is it?"

Sei poked her head out of the bathroom, frowned. "Nine-thirty."

Sachiko's stomach gave another lurch. _Oh god, I'm going to be late._ "I need to get ready," she said quickly. "I'm very sorry, but may I use the shower first?"

"Sure," Sei said. "And don't look so terrified. We're only a few minutes away from the building, fewer if we're smart enough to forget our heels. We'll make it."

Sachiko nodded, her mind desperately trying to pry itself away from the conversation and into the realm of panic. _An hour and a half to shower, shave my legs, put on my makeup, pick out a wardrobe— _she nearly vomited in panic. "Sei," she said, her breath catching in her throat. "I forgot my bag at the hotel."

"Aw, shit," Sei said, spitting out the last word. "Sachiko, you're lucky we're about the same height. I'll find you something while you're in the shower. I hope."

"You hope?"

"Most of my wardrobe is geared towards getting big tips at a bar. It's not exactly business-formal."

"Oh no," Sachiko said, grabbing her mind with her claws and dragging it, kicking and screaming, away from panic. "Do you have anything that buttons all the way up to the neck?"

Sei laughed at this. "Of course I do. You get in the shower. I'll scrounge something up by the time you get out."

Sei left, and Sachiko, having no choice but to trust her, stripped down and got into the shower. At some point during her ten minute shower, Sei entered the room and laid a neatly-folded pile of clothes on the toilet: A plain white blouse, crisp black dress pants, and a silk scarf, which she knew for a fact she could tie around Sachiko's neck in such a way as to make up for her lack of a coat or tie, which she knew without asking Sachiko had been intending to wear.

When Sachiko got out, she saw the stack of clothes, dried off apprehensively. Was Sei aware that leaving freshly-ironed clothes in a steamy bathroom was a great way to wrinkle them? She thought maybe she wasn't. When she tried them on, however, she found them perfectly crisp, and better still, almost a perfect fit. She wasn't entirely sure what the point of the scarf was, and so exited the bathroom carrying rather than wearing it, which Sei quickly remedied by tying it around her neck in probably the most ingenious imitation of a necktie she had ever seen.

Ten minutes later, shoes were donned, pieces of toast eaten as quickly as possible without _scarfing, _and they were out the door. On their way to the elevator, Sei grabbed her hand and took off in a dash to catch a closing door, and then kept hold of it. _(It's always easier to keep holding someone's hand than to start.) _Sachiko did not object, but thought it a bit unusual – She had never thought of Sei as precisely recalcitrant, but she had never been particularly touchy-feely, either. _(Was anybody at Lillian touchy-feely?)_ On the other hand, she didn't dislike it – Sei's hand was soft and delicate, and gripped hers just firmly enough to remind her that Sei was there, and as they walked through Manhattan, with its unfamiliar sights, its offensive smells, its hostile sounds, the reminder was nice. They didn't speak as they went, but the closer they got to 2 Hammarskjold Plaza, the more Sachiko began to sense some sort of agitation from Sei. She couldn't tell why, exactly; she only noticed that Sei stopped making eye contact with her at some point, squeezed her hand a little tighter, walked a little faster, her steps more rigid. The kind of thing that Sachiko had seen from Yumi when she was trying to run away from a knot in her stomach.

_Anxiety._

_No, not quite. _

_Fear._

And then, just as Sachiko was beginning to really think about this, they were there, in front of the door. Sei hesitated for a moment, and then opened the door, held it for Sachiko. As the door opened, Sachiko began to hear the song again, felt it dull her own nerves.

"It looks like we have about half an hour," Sachiko said, and Sei nodded absently, steering them towards the ledge of the little garden that seemed to exist solely to protect –

_The rose._

A brilliant, red rose, in the middle of the garden, sitting by itself. Sachiko's eyes locked onto it, and then she found herself sitting on the ledge, and all of a sudden Sei was holding her, and not gently.

"What—"

But something in her mind said, _no. Don't ask questions. _

And that, coupled with the song, was enough to pacify her.

And so Sei held Sachiko for a half an hour. At some point, they sat, but not once did Sei stop touching Sachiko in one way or another. Sachiko felt a kind of dull foreboding, but the song, which she was increasingly sure was coming from the rose, stopped her from considering it overmuch.

At 11 in the morning, two men with sharp eyes and crisp suits came to them, and asked Sachiko to come with them. Sei's hand tightened around Sachiko's for just a moment, and from nowhere, Sachiko thought, _second thoughts. _

And then Sei's hand let go, finally, and in the midst of her sudden and acute confusion, Sachiko had time to miss the warm comfort as the two men escorted Sachiko away. Sei didn't look at her.

_(is she crying?)_

When they got in the elevator, one of the men slid a card, and Sachiko began to move down, instead of up. All too late, alarm bells started going off in her head, the nervous edge that had been dulled by the rose's presence. Fifteen minutes later, she was gone: From 2 Hammarskjold Plaza; from New York City, from the world in which she had lived.

And at the precise moment that she exited the world of science and progress, Yumi Fukuzawa, thousands of miles away, unable to sleep at two in the morning in their small, comfortable, simply decorated home in Tokyo, felt a shiver pass over her. An hour later, she had woken Yoshino from a dead sleep, and was driving to her house.


	3. Chapter 3

Author's notes

I'm really sorry for the delay getting this chapter out. It's been sitting on my HD waiting to be edited, but my editor and I haven't been able to sync up in over a month and a half. This chapter is therefore unedited except by myself. Feel free to berate me for errors you find.

My editor thinks it's hilarious that I write my A/Ns before I write the chapter itself.

Nana, for those of you who are like me and didn't know this without doing research (I'm working my way through marimite s4 right now, but it's a slow haul) was Yoshino's _petite seour. _

Don't tell me you've never made the mistake of mixing the very bitter with the very salty. My own particularly disgusting mix is usually my morning coffee (black, like a man) followed shortly by my morning v8. It's rarely pleasant. On one occasion, I made stirfry with soy sauce, and overreduced the soy sauce a bit (making it saltier still); I drank it with an IPA and nearly gagged. On rare occasion (more often than I should admit to you), saltines and brandy. Good god, but I'm stupid.

Three

Stave: Commala come free / will ya come to me / though no one knows how far or wide / the gap might truly be

_He recognizes me the second time I come in, and tries to make conversation as I pay for my ramen and pads. I wonder if he understands how difficult it is for me to buy pads from an actual human being, much less a male, much less a male who is at least feigning interest in talking to me. I don't say a word to him throughout the whole thing, and by the time he instructs me to have a nice evening, I'm halfway out the door. _

_I wonder if he thinks I'm a bad person. _

By the time Yumi reached Yoshino's house, her 2AM shivers had faded into a vague, dreamlike memory, but a terrible, heavy dread had replaced it, settling in for the long haul in the very top of her bowels. Something academic inside her told her she was being silly, but something else, in a curt, no-nonsense voice which reminded her strongly and unexpectedly of Shimako, told her to listen to her instincts before she listened to something as useless as common sense_. _It was probably this voice, whose presence Yumi could honestly not account for (she had never had any sort of internal chorus of voices when her own thought process was concerned, but rather acted primarily on an intuition which ran deeper than she cared to admit) which caused her not to turn around and go home after the initial fear had passed.

She pulled into a narrow parking spot in front of Yoshino's apartment just after 2:45 in the morning, and Yoshino was waiting for her on the staircase leading to the second floor of the simple two-story building. She looked as composed as she ever did, dressed in a light blue blouse and jeans. _Where is she planning on going? _Yoshino could have been going out for coffee with a friend. Yumi, dressed in the disheveled T-shirt in which she slept, white shorts, and little else, could have been emerging, hung-over and bleary-eyed, from a one-night stand after a night of drinking.

Yumi got out of the car, and Yoshino stood, started towards her, and within seconds, Yumi was embracing the girl; at first in a simple greeting, which was not unusual, but within seconds she found herself squeezing: At first craving the pressure on her heart, on her stomach, as though this could force out the horrid feeling which had spread from her bowels all the way up to her throat; and then because she found herself unable to stop. She was crying gently, before she had registered even that holding Yoshino tightly made her feel just slightly better, and then she was sobbing-all this in the span of about twenty seconds. Yoshino, for her part, was not as surprised as she might have been, as though she understood – (and indeed, she knew what this brand of anxiety felt like, because hadn't it been Yumi who had done the same for her just over two years ago?)

It took another minute for Yumi to calm down, during which time not a single word passed between the two of them. When Yumi could lift her eyes again, Yoshino took her by the hand and led her inside; in part because she knew how badly embarrassed the girl would be if somebody actually took notice of what was happening (not likely, but still a consideration) and in part because she wanted Yumi to drink some tea if she was feeling sick to her stomach, or some brandy if she wasn't.

They took the stairs one careful step at a time, but Yumi's footing was surer with each, and by the time they reached the top, her face had regained some of its normal color. She started to fumble with an apology, but Yoshino refused to allow it, silencing her with a squeeze of her hand.

They entered Yoshino's apartment, the sudden, white light making Yumi squint. Yoshino half-encouraged, half-forced Yumi to sit down at the small table in the dining room, and left to put tea on. She took her time, and finally allowed her own, special breed of terror and Déjà vu to overtake her, finding herself shivering and crying with helpless rage. She had a deep feeling, one which lacked any basis in reality but nonetheless seemed utterly correct_, _that Yumi, in the coming years, would have to experience what she herself had experienced.

_Isn't it all the same? Isn't it? _

_ Didn't you watch Rei go down that alleyway, seem to duck behind a dumpster? Didn't you feel the same sick, inexplicable sense that Rei was simply _gone _the instant you lost sight of her? There was absolutely no logical reason to feel that way, except that she didn't come back, and when you went to look for her, she was not there, and in her place were those horrible chimes. _

_It's all the same._

The dull white noise of water boiling infiltrated her thoughts, and she poured a cup of tea, not thinking about it until she spilled some of it on her hand. She let a hiss out and recoiled, jerking back to the present, and went to the tap, ran cold water over her hand, trying not to curse herself a fool.

(_What was it that Rei used to say? Getting mad at yourself won't make the tea cooler, and if it did, you'd just be mad at yourself for serving cold tea.)_

"Are you all right?" Yumi was at the door to the kitchen, the concern on her face deep enough that Yoshino could not help but curse herself this time.

"Fine. I'm fine. I Just spilled a little. Please sit down, I'll be out in just a moment."

"Can I help with anything?"

_Damn it, Yumi. _"No, please have a seat. I'll take care of it."

Yumi lingered a moment and Yoshino refused to turn to look at her, feeling more frustrated by the second. When she heard the girl retreat to the table, she shut the tap off and took a moment to dry her hands, forcing her exhausted brain to stay on the (admittedly simple) task at hand.

_Tea. You're making tea. You need to make tea._

There was a mostly-full cup of tea by the teapot, cooling by the second. _You already made tea. At some point, Yoshino, you should probably check back into the present. They saved you a place, but since it's so late, you may have to bring tea if you want them to let you back in. _

She had already laid out a second cup and a little tray to shuttle them with. _(why on earth did I buy a tray? I think Yumi is the first person, aside from the ones that I ask to leave before we might get onto a topic as intimate as tea_, _to come to my house since Rei disappeared.) _She filled the cup and put both cups on the tray, and after a moment's thought, prepared a small plate of crackers. _(She probably won't be feeling like eating much after this. I know I didn't.) _

She picked the tray up and started to carry it out,

_ How am I going to get her to eat? She's going to lose weight if she's anything like me, but she's barely got any weight to lose. At least Rei had been experimenting with cooking French food, so we'd been ordering pizza a lot_

_ But then she found that marsala wine, and it was like she was born with it in her hands, she was finding new things to do with it every day_

_ She was tuning into a great chef, I was starting to get jealous_

and was about two centimeters from knocking it against the door frame before she stopped, closed her eyes, and forced herself out of her head and into her apartment. All at once, Yoshino couldn't remember if she had ever really divulged the circumstances of Rei's disappearance in their entirety to anybody, and all at once, it was critically important. When Yumi had made tea for her in her little kitchen, brought it out with some crackers to make sure Yoshino ate something, and sat down, held her hand, and just listened, had Yoshino ever mentioned that the alley that Rei had disappeared into had been a dead end, and that the manhole cover that seemed to egg her on was far too heavy for either of them to have lifted on their own? Had she tried to convince Yumi that Rei had been, and then not been, with no worldly explanation as to why?

_What if I go in there and she wants me to tell her that she's being silly? _

_ Am I even capable of that? _

_ The first question is whether or not you're capable of focusing on another person, I think. _

That was a good first question to answer, and Yoshino wasn't sure she could answer it, but then she was out in the dining room, setting the tea tray down near where Yumi sat, and it was far too late for that shit.

She poured Yumi a cup, and then poured one for herself. She had no idea how it would taste – if she'd burned it or oversteeped it, she'd never know until one of them pulled a face; or rather, until Yumi pulled a face. She sipped her own cup, and didn't taste it.

"It's very good," Yumi said, and while Yoshino wasn't sure if she believed her, she was quite certain she didn't really care, and that Yumi didn't, either. It was just something people said, and Yoshino had found herself increasingly disinterested in things people _just said _in recent years. _In all my time with her, I was never really sure whether Yumi was unfalteringly kind or a master of _just saying. _I suppose I'll know soon enough._

She wasn't sure she wanted to know. 

They sat in silence for a while, sipping their tea. Yoshino slowly came to the conclusion that her tea was indeed oversteeped, as she became increasingly aware of a bitter aftertaste building up in the back of her mouth. The crackers, which were salty and a little stale, probably almost a year old, did nothing to help, and the mix quickly became so heinously difficult to deal with without gagging that Yoshino wasn't sure she could finish the lot, hungry though she was. (She had skipped dinner, and her memories of lunch were fuzzy at best. This was the makeup of about half of her nights, while the other half saw her eating as ravenously as she had at the nice Italian restaurant with the nice, not-so-clingy,

_you're awful_

boy.) She occasionally glanced up at Yumi, whose eyes were distant. Yoshino knew exactly where Yumi was – she was wherever Sachiko was, and that, if what Yumi had told her was true, was nowhere.

Then, all at once, Yumi said, "It's probably nothing. It's got to be nothing."

_It was just a dream, right? Not even that – just a feeling. A chill. A matter of less than a minute. _

Yoshino thought about what she should _just say. You're probably right, just silliness. Do you feel any better? I know my tea was horrible, but you must have calmed down from the drive, right?_

_ Why in the hell would I say that? _

And yet, Yoshino couldn't quite bring herself to ask the other question, either - the important question. _If you thought that, why did you wake up in the middle of the night and drive all the way to my house? _That would be too cruel, too soon, so she was stuck in an awkward middle ground – unable to lie and provide comfort, but equally unable to force Yumi to see reality.

_You are certainly making a very arbitrary decision about what reality looks like. For all you know, Sachiko is fine, and Yumi had herself a scotch last night and it's catching up with her. _

_ (Yumi doesn't drink scotch)_

And in the middle of this convoluted train of thought, Yoshino asked, "Have you tried calling her?"

This simple, logical question seemed to take Yumi off guard. As though she hadn't even considered it.

"I couldn't…" Yumi said, slowly. "She's in the middle of a meeting right now."

_She doesn't really believe it._

_ She does, but she's trying not to._

"Where was she staying?"

Yumi gave a start, and then clamped her hand over her mouth. "She was staying with Sei! Last night, she was with Sei."

"Sei Satou?" A name Yoshino hadn't heard in what seemed like years. Had they ever been close? Yoshino couldn't remember, which meant they probably hadn't. She had made Yumi very happy, though—Yoshino remembered this quite clearly.

"Yes! She called me from her apartment last nigh—well, this afternoon. They were—Sachiko was—very drunk."

Yoshino had a hard time believing this, but then, Yoshino knew next to nothing about Sachiko Ogasawara, and she was fully aware of this. She and Rei had been close, but she had never wholly taken to Yoshino, who had always wondered if it had been her choice in literature.

"Do you know Sei's phone number?"

Yumi, completely unexpectedly, blushed slightly at this, and Yoshino frowned, not quite knowing what to make of it. "She…always sends me her new phone number when she moves or changes cell phones."

Yoshino still didn't understand why Yumi was blushing, but resolved not to ask about it, either. "Why don't you try calling her?"

Apparently, Yoshino's tone had been less patient than she had intended. "I'm sorry!" Yumi said at once, bowing her head. "You must be so exhausted!" As though she had only just realized that it was nearing three in the morning. Yoshino found herself unable to keep from smiling at this, and in retrospect, wondered why she had wanted to.

She reached across the table, stretching just a bit awkwardly, and took Yumi's hand in both of hers. The two girls, old friends, companions, occasional partners in crime, met one another's eyes for a moment, and both smiled, each in spite of herself. Yumi leaned in a bit, letting Yoshino hold her hand without pressing her chest against the table, and Yoshino said, "Don't apologize. You did the same thing for me, and even if you hadn't, I wouldn't care. But call Sei. It's a fine time over there, and I'm sure you'll-" _you won't feel better after you do. You'll feel worse. But why am I so sure of that? _"Well, I'm sure you'll feel more certain."

Yumi nodded in agreement, and she took her phone from her jeans pocket and dialed Sei's number.

After they hung up, she was sure.

Response: Commala come three / if you won't come to me / then past the worlds and across the stars / I will come to thee

_It's my third time in this convenience store in a week. It's a heavy week, and in addition to being terrified I'm bloated and angry. I don't think I'm ever angry except for on heavy weeks – it takes more energy than I have. I've ruined two pairs of underwear since I started, and I can't afford to replace them. And to top it off, _he's _working again. Does he do anything else? _(That's stupid,if he's got a regular schedule, why wouldn't he be working regularly?) _Does he always have to be in here when I'm in here, being nosy and intruding in my space? And does he always have to smile at me? Doesn't he know it's creepy? _

_No matter how hard I try, I can't quite seem to make him be a bad person. That makes him all the worse. _

It was about five in the morning when Yoshino finally got Yumi to stop crying and lay down, and, after sending a quick email to her office informing them that she would be absent for a day or two, she laid awake, alone on her couch until well past sunrise. Not thinking about anything in particular, but rather, _feeling. _Something she hadn't really done at any length for what seemed like

_(two)_

years.

She started with guilt, and ran with it. As horrible as her dear friend's situation was, she was grateful to see her again. How long had it been? Long enough that she had to ask that question. Both she and Yumi were _gainfully employed, _and Yumi, at least, had a wife. _(And I have my awkward IT boys, ha-ha.) _A wife, and that rhymed with _life, _and that was what she had. And having a _life _meant, didn't it, that you had to do things like ask your friends how long it had been since you'd seen them.

Those people who she had seen daily in school, relied on in more ways than she herself knew, she now had to _make plans_ with. Somehow, Yoshino had never been very good at making plans – maybe she was just too prideful to ask people to come, to please smile at her and laugh with her and catch her eye and know what the look meant at just the right time. Maybe it just made her feel pathetic to admit that she really couldn't do it by herself. Maybe it hurt her pride to know that they wouldn't always call you right when you needed them to, or sometimes at all.

Yes. Prideful.

That sounded about right. Pride was a sin, but if she didn't have one or two sins, she'd never have a reason to make plans with the Virgin Mary, would she?

The guilt deepened as dawn approached. Not only was Yumi finally here, she was giving Yoshino a _purpose. _Something that was actually _worth _doing. Something beyond going to work and going home and reading those emails that _he _sometimes sent her, looking at the photographs of the alley that he'd taken, of the men who sometimes loitered around it. Something beyond picking someone up at a bar on Friday night and sending them packing on Saturday morning.

Yoshino knew that she would remember the few hours she had spent in the middle of the night with Yumi more vividly than she would probably remember the last month of her life. She had slept with one person in the last month, that IT boy, and he had seemed thoroughly enamored with her, and she probably wouldn't even remember his face in a week. She had already forgotten about what they had done — she knew they had done it, but that was a far cry from anything meaningful. He was just one more part of her routine. _Wake up, brush your teeth, eat something so you don't pass out, get dressed, get felt up on the train, get to work and do nothing of importance to anyone, scratch an itch if you feel it too sharply. Maybe I should abstain from sex for a year just to see how it feels. _

As the sky continued to grow color, _(red like a blushing virgin_,_ not that you remember much about _that_, ha-ha)_ she realized just how much she was enjoying feeling guilty, because of how long it had been since she felt _anything _so sharply. It seemed that everything had meant the world to her in high school – a couple of words from Rei had been enough to enrage her to the point where she was no longer thoroughly in control of her tongue. How long had it been since she lost control of _anything? _

_(When you're sober, anyway.)_

A single look from the same girl could calm her entire world. Hell, even Nana had been able to set her on fire from time to time.

Now?

Now the only time she treated herself to a piece of cake was when she _made plans_. Now she was lying here in the dark, not feeling sorry for her dearest friend in the world, but feeling sorry for herself, because she was just enjoying the feeling so fucking much. Now she no longer crushed rabidly on one of the bosses from a floor up, a handsome man just a little older than her, and came home every day to talk to Rei about it.

_What in the hell happened to me?_

Eventually, the sound of Yumi's gentle crying prompted her to sit up and take notice of what her friend was going through. She had tried to be really _there _for her that night, and she couldn't help but think that she had entirely failed. The feeling was so gutwrenching that she was unable to stop herself from taking a moment to savor that, too. She sat up and thought to herself, not for the first time that night, _your friend needs you more than she ever has in her lifetime, in exactly the same way you needed her not so long ago, so get the fuck out of your head and help her. _

And this time—maybe it was the small noise of Yumi crying, a series of tiny gasps punctuated by an occasional sob, or maybe she was just so fucking tired that she couldn't think anymore—it actually made an impact on her. She sat up, and went into her room, where Yumi was supposed to be sleeping, found only a lump underneath her sheets. She sighed gently.

_It's almost the same. Almost the same as when I went to her house, two years ago. _

The only difference was that it hadn't taken Yumi the better part of the evening to go to her. She hoped that Yumi would forgive her that in time.

She gently pulled the comforter back, and found Yumi, curled into a ball, her face in her hands. Wordlessly, she laid down and took the girl in her arms, and did not move, and so doing, provided exactly what the girl needed. One of them fell asleep eventually, or maybe both. Maybe they slept in turns. Yoshino was never able to recall, which, of course, meant that she had slept.

When she regained some semblance of higher brain function, she had no idea what time it was. Yumi was still there, her chest moving gently, her cell phone clutched in her hand. Waiting for a call that logic and reason told her should come eventually, but that her heart told her never would. Yumi didn't know it yet (Yoshino did, all too well), but she would spend the better part of the next year obsessively checking her cell phone.

Yoshino was dozing again when Yumi's voice jerked her awake.

"Does it get easier?" she said, her voice small.

_You should say yes. _Yoshino knew it, but she also knew that this would be a disservice. She had been to several support groups over the last two years, to several more therapists, and all of them said that it got easier as time went. All of them were fucking liars. "No," she said eventually. "You stop feeling it so intensely, but you stop feeling much of anything."

Yumi didn't reply for just long enough for Yoshino to wish that Rei had spent a week or two beating the honest out of her when Rei had still been able to beat anything out of anyone.

"I'm sorry," Yumi said, eventually, "that I didn't come to see you more often."

_What the fuck are you apologizing for? You have your own life._

"Don't apologize," Yoshino said, "It's…I'm the one who stopped calling." It wasn't as though they had stopped seeing one another altogether. Only that they had had to start _making plans, _and those plans had become less and less frequent as time went on.

"I understand why."

_Right now you feel like the only thing you might ever be able to make plans to do again is cry all over somebody's couch. _

Exactly the same.

"Promise me something," Yumi said.

"What?"

"Promise me that you'll start calling again. I'll start calling you more often, too. I don't want to…to be alone."

"You could move in," Yoshino suggested wildly, and wondered why she had. Of course Yumi wouldn't. Because

"No. I want to be home if Sachiko comes back. Whenever she comes back, I want to be there."

Because that. Because exactly that. That's why Yoshino hadn't moved out of her cheap apartment, even though she had been able to afford to for years. Because she wanted Rei to know where to find her. _Just in case._

"I promise," Yoshino said quietly. "I'll spend every day with you, if you want."

"You have a job."

"I have a job but no life." She smiled against Yumi's back at this. _Isn't that by choice? How could it not be?_ As if feeling her grin, Yumi shifted into her slightly, and Yumi tightened her arms. They didn't say anything after that, not for a long time.

Eventually, Yumi said, "We have to find them."

_I already know how to get to them. You just go all the way down an alleyway, climb down a manhole, and into hell. _

"I've been trying," Yoshino said. "For two years now. If you like, when you're ready, I'll show you everything I've learned."

"We could—" Yumi tried to sit up, and Yoshino forced her back down, said, "Not now. Not even this month."

"But—"

"If you start now, right away, while you're still feeling like this, it will eat you alive." _I started the week after she vanished. Cops are too fucking slow._

"I don't care about—"

"You can't find anybody if you're a meal to an obsession," Yoshino said gently, and wished she was better at taking her own advice. _How wise an alcoholic is about moderation. Doles out great advice about how to keep it from eating your life. Usually while drunk. _ "Promise me."

Yumi was quiet for an indeterminable length of time (they were all indeterminable in a dark room when your only view was the back of the neck of a woman you loved.) "I promise."

And so, promises to one another made, they eventually drifted off again. They slept listlessly, but they slept.


End file.
